Ten years ago, there was still some merit to this. Given changes to browsers and search engines, I believe this has a "vanity license plate" level of importance today.
> There is no definite way of isolating the importance of the .com but it is likely to have played a part.
"We have no way of knowing if traffic would be as high or higher if we stuck with .io, but it definitely would not have been."
"One of the first things we noticed was that the traffic patterns between supertokens.io (our actual domain) and supertokens.com were nearly identical. Whenever our .io traffic had a big spike, so did the .com, even though there was nothing on it yet. More importantly, these spikes meant that a significant portion of potential users went to supertokens.com directly."
If they're driving traffic spikes to a domain squatter - probably reasonable to assume owning both those domains is helping.
Plus - 8k is a pittance, all things considered.
As far as direct traffic, they migrated to .com on 1/15/23, at which point supertokens.com already had 1,473 referring domains and 16.6K backlinks. I think it's more likely that the traffic they saw was the result of that instead of people typing the exact domain name (which is relatively rare).
I'd also submit that this is the story as told by their agency, who probably also told them to write this content marketing piece based on that explanation.
Our inference or best guess based on the above is that people were typing supertokens.com directly in the URL bar on the browser. Like you said - I would not have expected that (and still doubt it) but dont have any alternative explanations for why that would be the case.
Our agency doesnt know we've even written this. I still need to share it with them.